Tale of a Guardian
by WeLonelyOldSouls
Summary: A short piece of Zavala musing about our guardian and her transformation from the Black Garden on.


She came back shell shocked, ammo depleted, armor in tatters. Her ghost didn't galivant about like he had before. He was quick, direct, used cover like he himself had been firing and taking fire. Her ship had scoring on it, swaths of scorched metal and burned circuits. The engine was barely firing, having limped back to the city. Worst of all—she couldn't say anything. She tried to debrief, tried to say anything at all, but the words died in her throat, swallowed up by some vex monstrosity.

There was a hollow, distant look in her eyes. A dazed blur that only lifted when something moved too fast or whirred a little too loud. When Cayde transmatted in, she nearly took his head out before realizing she had drawn Zavala's pistol, taken cover behind Ikora and drawn a bead on Cayde-6.

Shell shocked was the least of it. Whatever had happened in the garden, whatever she had found there, had killed in that festering pit, it had done its share of damage. The hushed talk spread across the tower like wildfire. _She's broken. The vex did something to her. But, she killed the darkness. Alone._

And that's perhaps what it had been, hadn't it? She had gone into the deep alone and come out changed. Wounded.

Cayde took her on patrol with him and quietly reported that she was different, beyond just the mutism. She was fiercer in her attacks, less forgiving. Reckless, but strangely stronger. Her light burned bright, but burned harsh.

It showed in the Crucible. Shaxx quietly had a word with him, that she was easily one of his best fighters in the crucible, but that she was too cruel. She didn't fight with her team, didn't help them with the objectives. She was a killing machine, but that's all she was. Death.

He finally had to assign her a fireteam. Two other guardians who would temper her callousness. They attacked the strike list with vengeance, going out for weeks at a time to eliminate threats. Her legend grew and grew, and she drifted further and further away from who she had been.

Cold seeped in where there had been warmth. Her smiles became forced and then stopped altogether. She trained under different teachers, mastered different paths of light. She was the first he knew of, in a long time, to master two different energies.

Then the vault happened. Six went down. Four came out. Then three did. The city was abuzz.

_Did you hear she led a team back into the vault?_

_Yeah, and she lost two guardians._

_No, she went back and found them._

_She what?!_

It was neatly typed up by her ghost, the only person to give him mission accounts on her anymore. The six had gone into the vault, had beaten the gatekeeper, crossed the labyrinth, and found Aetheon. There, using the last remnants of Kabr's light (And that was a memory, a twist he didn't need) they had broken through the time streams and isolated Aetheon and killed it. Killed him, at a cost. The two guardians who held the stream isolated were lost. Vanished into the dark corners of time.

Then she quietly went back without telling anyone. And brought them out. No one knew how, though they could all guess at why. When asked, the two guardians she rescued didn't know how she did it either, but they did have one story to tell.

The mute guardian spoke again.

"Guardians make their own fate." She rasped.

That's what she said to them, "Guardians make their own fate." One of them held a modified vex line rifle, the other a powerful hand canon.

"She gave these to us, and then continued on." The two guardians were the last to see her until she showed up in the Cosmodrome, stealing a hive sword from a knight and cleaving him in two with it. Reports quietly came in as Eris Morn climbed out of the Hellmouth and made her way back to the Tower. The two women were seen together, not exactly talking, but consorting, conspriring. The blinded and the mute, who no one expected much from. How they were mistaken.

Next thing Zavala knows, there's a request for a fireteam. A hive witch, Omnigul is holed up in the old array complex and needs to be killed. The Guardian, she killed Omnigul, then turned her sight on Lunasbane, on Crota.

Zavala drew the line here. He was not authorizing a mission to attack a hive god. Not when they were still recovering the dead from the moon. (Which if he judged the Speaker's ever expanding collection of dead ghosts that just showed up, was going well, and driven by the most infuriating guardian he had the pleasure to work with—and he worked with Cayde!)

She disregarded his orders. It really shouldn't have surprised him, as she wasn't a fan of following directions. Insubordination was nothing new to her. (Sneaking to the moon, breaking into the Ishtar collective, violating the exclusion zone, invading the reef!) They went down into the hellmouth, where their signals vanished. Later, they reappeared. He was dead. Lunasbane was gone, wiped out from his home, his throne world. Eris practically sang in joy, weeping those hissing black tears.

Banshee came to him one night, quietly reporting a gun he saw her building. Well, he said growing, but you can't grow a gun, can you? (He was wrong. He was so wrong. It was so wrong. Zavala very quietly moved it to the exclusion list under a very prestigious title. _Weapon of Sorrow.) _

(She really hated the rules, as he talked with the bots that oversaw the vaults. Her vault was pretty much the entirety of the vanguard exclusion list. Red death, last word, universal remote, bad juju, Necrocasm as she called it. As he was leaving, he thought he saw Thorn, but he very purposefully did **not **look closer.)

All was quiet. Too quiet. It wasn't until he got a nice message from Petra Venj of all people, (Petra Venj? Last he knew she **hated** them. Why was she sending him a nice letter?) that he realized what had been happening. The guardian had gone to the Reef. Snuck out under his very nose. She had kept busy, dismantled the last of the House of Winter, scattered the House of Devils (again) and then finding and eliminating some of the House of Kings, the ones who no one had seen in nearly a decade. Oh, and recaptured the self-proclaimed Kell of the House of Wolves, a captain named Skolas.

Now, where did he know that name from? Oh, Six Fronts. That's where. He colored the air purple around him with the filth he let slip after that realization. Ikora drew up a single eyebrow and made a few notes. He tried not to blush.

For a few months, Zavala gave up trying to guide her. He ignored the prison fights, the recursion of vex, the cabal redeployment, the next set of fallen attacks. He turned a blind eye (and encouraged Shaxx to do the same) to the trials of Osiris. He even shared a drink with the last iron lord, the three titans sitting peacefully in a room for the first time in years.

(They would all deny that it was the result of a drinking game, based on the mute guardian.)

(Zavala definitely lost.)

(Saladin cheated; he knew it.)

He had to tune back in when Eris morn's prophesies started coming true. It sobered them all up. They had been riding the coattails of the mute guardian's victory, and now they were not prepared.

Zavala organized a meeting, and despite Cayde walking out halfway through, they had most of a plan together by the time he returned. They were going to use the Dead orbit fleet to screen a strike team, who would set up transmat beacons along the hull, which they would use to yank the hull away from the rest of the ship, exposing a weakness, which would then be exploited by—

Or they already had a beacon because Cayde was sneaky and the Mute Guardian was just that good. Scrap the plan. (at this point, they could tell him that she had communed with the nine themselves and he would buy it. Was Brother Vance correct in that she was Osiris in disguise? Or maybe Saint-14? Personally, he thought more along the lines of Anna Bray, but if he really wanted to embrace the conspiracy he would say Rezyl.

Legion breaker. God-slayer. House killer. She earned her titles yet again over the course of the taken war. Entire contingents of enemies, vanished. The resurgence of the House of Wolves never left the cave they cowered in. She cleared planets of taken influence, quashed a prison rebellion in the reef, crossed out the last ranking cabal in Sol.

(Zavala had to stop and run through the records on that one. Since she had broken into the exclusion zone, she had indeed taken out cabal valus after bracus after primus. They- she had- Zavala had to take a second to breathe. She had beaten the cabal war machine without anyone realizing it. That transmission they caught the tail end of? It was a message of defeat. That Sol was too strong. He had a minor freak out. Ikora caught him and shared her hip flask. It burned worse than gargling with a solar grenade, but it dulled the gravity of it all.)

The next report he flat out walked away from. There was no way that she had killed the taken king. Oryx was not that easy to defeat. He didn't believe it. But, the reports came in. Taken wandering aimlessly. Only attacking en masse when guardians got too close. Whatever had been driving them was gone.

Her private war on the darkness and the forces that threatened the city continued. When the House of Devils (Again? How many times would they she have to beat them down? The House had to be scraping the bottom of the barrel by now.) broke into the SIVA complex, he didn't even bat an eye. He forwarded the notice to the guardian, cc'd shiro-4, and sent Saladin a barrel of mead. The chunk of whatever he got back from shiro made a great paperweight. Even if he was to 'never get it wet!'.

Then reports started coming in. Somehthing was happening, something big. The fallen deserted their houses. The hive pulled back their launch ships. The vex hunkered down. No one knew what was coming, but they could all feel it. Of course, she was out of the city when they came. The Red Legion. They were overwhelmed almost immediately, blindsided as all of the early warning systems failed. The cabal were simply too close to use any of the larger weapons. There was no time to recall guardians, no contingency for an attack of this scale. They did what they could, but it seemed like all was lost. Then she ran up from the hanger, and suddenly he could breathe again. Her ghost let him know that Cayde was alive and pushing, and Zavala felt his resolve strengthen. She held the line for him until she had to go, and slipped toward Ikora, who's grief was palpable. The Speaker's death hit them hard, but they had to push on. He saw Shaxx screaming wildly and slashing with a glowing sword he recognized from the guardians' vault. Absently, he wondered who was better equipped, her or the vanguard. It didn't matter now. He was taking the people to safety and listening to the comm when it happened.

The light vanished.

And everything collapsed.

It would be much later that he saw her again, right when he had almost given up hope. She didn't say a word, but he could see it in her. She had her light, somehow. Of all of the guardians he knew, she was the one he wanted to be empowered. If they could have but one champion, she would be it. She pieced together the system, stitched communications and supply lines, carried messages and scavenged gear- run ragged as she prepared them all for war. For an assault they couldn't expect to survive.

Gaul, for all that he was an abomination, was magnificent. He was suffused with the light, consumed by it. He shone brighter than anything else Zavala had ever seen. But in the midst of his halo, of the corona of pure energy, there was a sunspot- one plane of darkness that stood against. One light that would not be overtaken.

The traveler woke. Called by it's chosen. By the guardian. It was the only explanation, the only way that it hadn't ever stirred before, in the centuries since the collapse. It woke, looked over at all it had accomplished, swatted the blasphemer out of the sky, and went back to sleep. But for one glorious moment, it was awake. The guardian, when she returned, had tears in her eyes. Nobody had the gumption to ask.

Shortly after, the emissary arrived. The guardian listened, and competed, but ultimately walked away. And the emissary left, willed away by the cosmic enigma.

Then came the transmission from Mercury, from Brother Vance. Osiris had been found. Sagira was hurt. Ikora fretted and rushed to help as quick as she could, but she found the situation already being handled by who else but the guardian. She lent her light to help, lent her wisdom, and the guardian walked into the infinite forest alone. She walked out with Osiris. Zavala never asked what happened next, it wasn't his business.

Shaxx approached him later, with a whisper and a look. He'd heard from a ghost, from a long thought dead guardian. Anna was alive. Zavala, knowing the trouble she got herself into, rushed to Mars. Almost guiltily, he caught them, Anna and the guardian, walking to wake Rasputin.

He had to update the emergency log a few days later, and message Hawthorne about having another cask of mead sent to the tower. She had ended another paracausal threat. What was this, the fourth? Fifth? He didn't even both to keep track anymore.

Then, one day, Cayde went to the prison with his favorite guardian. Cayde didn't come back. Not alive. It was a sad moment, a harsh reminded that no one is immortal.

The voice, hoarse from disuse, cold and fiery with hate, rasped from the corner.

"Uldren Sov is mine,"

Zavala felt a chill run down his spine. That was not the voice he remembered. They had gained so much from the guardian, now walking toward their ship, but at what cost.

When he received the notice from Petra, a mere six days later, he asked himself again. At what cost did they buy prosperity?

Was it worth it?

Then he started getting requests. He though them spam at first, but soon realized they were no accidental repeats- the home of the awoken was in flux, trapped in an endless loop. She killed another beast, this one an old danger mutated by a new threat. Shaxx stopped by and clapped a hand on his shoulder, "her trophy is larger than mine. Much larger."

"How big?"

"You don't want to know."

Riven. That was its name, even as the Drifter slinked in, set up shop. Zavala watched the dreaming city and forgot to pay attention to his tower and the Drifter set in. It took him walking into his office one day to find a smoking hole in his chair to wake up. The man with the golden gun had stopped by with a message.

There were rumors of strange rumblings under the tower, of ancient vaults and weapons brought to light. Zavala watched it with a weary eye. The consensus voted to allow the drifter to stay, and he hatched a new scam. Three frames vanished from the tower and it wasn't until he spied on the drifter that he found one skulking by the secondary docking bay.

The cabal, he thought beaten, were only cowed, and their emperor had a long arm.

Things were changing, he realized. Strange bedfellows, with their own agendas and plans. Did the vanguard fit into this way of life anymore? Did he? He wasn't one of these new guardians who could look at an eliksni and see ally. He could only see teeth and guns and danger. He couldn't stomach using the darkness against itself, couldn't bring himself to test the new developments he was hearing about. So much of his world was changing, and he wasn't the type to change with it.


End file.
